Dame Anita Roddick

12:01AM BST 12 Sep 2007

Dame Anita Roddick, who died on Monday aged 64, was the fearsomely energetic founder and guiding spirit of The Body Shop, the international cosmetics and toiletries empire built on a combination of soap, bubble bath and moral engagement.

The key to The Body Shop's success was the identification of its products (Fuzzy Peach Shower Gel, Brazil Nut Conditioner, Raspberry Shampoo) with the social and political preoccupations of the young women who constituted its main customer base: animal welfare, the protection of the Brazilian rain forest, Third World poverty and, of course, the age-old pursuit of youth, beauty and sexual allure.

For customers, its idealistic campaigning was part of the company's stock-in-trade, and for professional campaigners the stores offered a ready-made target audience.

The Body Shop played an energetic part in Save the Whale in 1985, Save the Brazilian Rain Forest in 1989 and the petition against testing industrial products on animals in 1990. One year, branches collected 11 million signatures for a human rights petition. To many of her customers Anita Roddick was a heroine - the diminutive, tousle-haired "Mother Teresa of Capitalism".

Her husband Gordon was the financial and business brains behind the enterprise while Anita provided the passion, the activism, the ideas and the publicity. She regarded the fact that Body Shop had no marketing department as some sort of moral statement, yet with her as its public face it never needed one.

Loquacious, wacky and opinionated, she was so far outside the normal businesswoman template that it was easy for her to attract free coverage.

Her interviews were bravura performances in which journalists' questions served as launch pads for breathless stream-of-consciousness outpourings of facts, fancies and opinions - about Anita Roddick's passion for whales; her thoughts on the meaning of life; her views on pubic hair; aromatherapy; her family; her commitment to small farmers in Central America; her commitment to feminism; the benefits of cocoa butter; her hatred of profit-obsessed multinationals and so on. No copywriter, as one interviewer observed, could have invented Anita Roddick's scatter-gun gush.

Highly likeable in many ways, though to some also extremely irritating, Anita Roddick was absolutely genuine in her moral outrage, her anti-establishment idealism and her self-belief. She described herself without irony as a "ballsy, truth-telling, free-thinking, heart-bleeding, myth-debunking, non-conforming and hell-raising activist".

This was not a pose. In 1999 she was tear-gassed on the anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle, and she helped to fund training for anti-globalisation campaigners in non-violent direct action. Body Shop also gave generously to charity, one of its most effective initiatives (begun by Gordon Roddick) being to co-found The Big Issue magazine to give a voice and a political profile to homeless people.

But critics sometimes charged that Anita Roddick's claims to high ethical standards sat ill with the reality of Body Shop's business practices. In 1994 a group campaigning to improve business ethics estimated that "fair trade" ingredients acquired by the company under its much-trumpeted "Trade Not Aid" slogan accounted for fewer than one per cent of its sales.

The claim that none of its products was tested on animals was, again, only partly true. The company did not always make it clear that many of the ingredients it used had been tested on animals by other companies, or that it was company policy to ban only ingredients tested on animals in the past five years - a less stringent rule than that applied by some competitors.

In 1989 the West German government successfully sued Body Shop's German subsidiary for misleading advertising, after which it swapped its "not tested on animals" label for the vaguer "against animal testing".

Another criticism was that Anita Roddick, deliberately or otherwise, sometimes confused business expediency with moral endeavour - as when she appeared in a commercial chattering with characteristic fervour about paying for visits to impoverished tribes with her American Express card.

Moreover, her philippics about the evils of global capitalism, profits and the world trading system sat rather oddly with her status as the leader of a highly profitable multinational corporation with nearly 2,000 outlets in 49 countries.

Supporters in the environmental movement argued that Anita Roddick's contribution lay not so much in actual achievements in the field of corporate ethics as in the way in which she had used her fame, her outspokenness and the Body Shop brand to promote public awareness of global issues and bring ethical issues to the forefront of the business agenda.

Certainly the paradoxes inherent in her position did not seem to cause her undue anxiety. When a representative of what she called the "zealots of cynicism" surprised her by asking how she could square her call for a boycott of China over its human rights record with the fact that Body Shop was sourcing dozens of products from China, having rebuffed pleas to switch to more ethical sources, she replied: "You just don't understand, do you? I was talking about what business should do, not what we actually do. My job is to inspire. But we have a bloody business to run."

The third of four children, Anita Roddick was born Anita Lucia Perilli on October 23 1942 in a bomb shelter at Littlehampton, Sussex. Her parents, Gilda and Donny, had left Naples to come to England before the Second World War. They opened a café in which the young Anita would work at weekends.

Her parents divorced when she was eight, and Gilda went on to marry Donny's cousin, Henry, with whom, as it turned out, she had been in love all along. Henry died 18 months later.

It was only when she reached the age of 18 that Anita discovered that she was in fact Henry's daughter, not Donny's, a fact which delighted her as she had always preferred her "step-father" to the drunken Donny.

Anita failed her 11-plus and attended Maude Allen Secondary Modern School for Girls. After leaving school she trained as a teacher at the Newton Park College of Education, Bath, took off to Paris, where she worked in the clippings library of the Herald Tribune, and then Geneva, where she was employed briefly in the women's rights department of the International Labour Organisation.

She spent a year on an Israeli kibbutz, then hit the hippie trail to Tahiti, the New Hebrides, New Caledonia, Australia and South Africa. In Johannesburg she was expelled from the country for attending "black night" in a jazz club.

Back in Britain, she met Gordon Roddick, the son of a Scottish grain broker, at Littlehampton's El Cubana nightclub. She was 26 and looking, as she put it, for "sympathetic sperm". It took her "four and a half seconds" to know that she had found what she was looking for.

As for Gordon: "He said the minute he looked at me he knew he was doomed." The couple had been together for six years before they married in 1970. The ceremony was held in a wedding chapel in Reno while Anita was pregnant with their second daughter.

Returning to Littlehampton, they ran a B&B and then an Italian-style health food restaurant called Paddington's, after which Gordon announced that he wanted to take off on a 5,300-mile, 18-month horseback ride from Buenos Aires to New York, leaving Anita to look after their two children.

To make ends meet during her husband's absence, Anita Roddick decided to start a small business. Before leaving for America Gordon had helped her to negotiate a £4,000 bank loan and, inspired by a cosmetics store called The Body Shop which she had seen at Berkeley, California, she opened her first shop in Brighton in 1976.

She stocked its shelves with 15 exotic-sounding skin care products, which she knocked up in her kitchen from "every little ingredient" and packaged in recyclable urine sample bottles (to keep costs low) in five sizes "so it looked like I had 100". She painted the walls of her new shop in what would become Body Shop's trademark dark green to hide the patches of damp and mould.

Anita Roddick marketed her new business brilliantly, and soon the shop was thriving. By the time her husband returned she had opened a second store - a local businessman, former garage owner Ian McGlinn, having provided a further £4,000 in financial backing in return for a 24 per cent stake.

Back together again, the Roddicks began developing a franchise network and opened their first overseas store in Brussels in 1978. In 1984, just eight years after its foundation, the company floated on the Stock Exchange. By 1990 it was valued at £800 million and, by virtue of the Roddicks' 30 per cent shareholding, Anita Roddick was listed as the fourth richest woman in Britain.

But she never seemed entirely comfortable with the business tycoon label and sometimes expressed her regret over the decision to go public, despite the extra resources it gave her for her campaigns.

Ever the hippie, she hated the corporate, profits-driven world in which she found herself and often crossed swords with some of her more traditional colleagues.

When the business took a downturn in the 1990s, mainly because of adverse trading conditions in the United States, both the Roddicks were accused by "the suits" of neglecting the core business in favour of their campaigning obsessions.

In 2005 Anita Roddick announced that she was giving away her £51 million fortune via the Roddick Foundation that supports a number of ethical entrepreneurs. This went some way towards softening the blow to Body Shop fans the following year when the Roddicks announced that they had agreed to a £652 million takeover of the company by the French cosmetics giant L'Oréal, which, shortly before the sale, had been given the lowest possible rating by Ethical Consumer magazine because of its record on animal testing and its close connections with the chemical industry.

Anita Roddick's prediction that Body Shop would be a sort of "Trojan horse" for ethical practices left many unconvinced. However, the furore did little long-term damage to her reputation, and she subsequently featured in a survey of the most admired powerful women.

In February this year Anita Roddick revealed that she had been diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver as a result of contracting Hepatitis C through a blood transfusion while giving birth to her youngest daughter, Sam, in 1971.

Determined, as ever, to turn her own experience into something worthwhile, she set about raising awareness of the disease, expressing outrage that the government was spending £40 million on telling the public about the switchover to digital television and only £3 million on raising awareness of hepatitis C. "It's a bit of a bummer," she admitted, "but you groan and move on."

Anita Roddick's publications include Body and Soul (1991), Business as Unusual (2000) and an activists' handbook entitled Take It Personally.